Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/3239

ATI's Surprise

by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 16, 2005 4:51 PM EST


Working with the Avivo team at ATI is very different from working with the GPU folks, they really are two very separate groups over there. Giving everyone a little present, for free, before the end of the year is just something we don't usually see from companies.

I made 3 trips to NYC in the past 2 weeks, one for Sun, one for Intel and one for ATI. I got back from my ATI trip last night and immediately went to work on the Catalyst 5.13 piece. I seemed to run into a few problems, but I'm working on getting those resolved so I can bring an updated Avivo DVD quality comparison.

One thing I would like to touch on is NVIDIA's PureVideo. I've talked to NVIDIA about this before and how the PureVideo DVD decoder is never bundled for free, anywhere, even if you're buying one of their $600 cards. NVIDIA's stance is that they've got to make money, but I look at the stuff that ATI is giving away for free right now or in the near future (accelerated H.264 decoder, Avivo Video Converter) and I can't help but feel that PureVideo, at least on the highest end cards, ends up nickle-and-diming NVIDIA's biggest supporters. After all, just about anything you buy these days comes with some sort of a DVD decoder, so why shouldn't NVIDIA at least try to do the same with PureVideo?

I am curious to see when NVIDIA will bring H.264 decode acceleration to the table on their GPUs, as they did promise it at the launch of G70. I'm convinced that NVIDIA will do it, after all they have to given the move to Blu-ray and HD-DVD starting next year, but I'm really curious as to when.

My Intel meeting in NYC also involved listening in to an update on Viiv. While I do think that Intel is doing the right thing with Viiv, I honestly don't think it will be all that big of a deal until Vista. The reason being that we do need real HD support (read: cablecard and not just OTA) on MCE PCs, and until that comes along, Viiv does little more than rebrand MCE boxes without fixing a serious problem in their functionality.

The Sun meeting was about their new Sunfire servers based on the UltraSPARC T1. I was working on an architecture piece on the UltraSPARC T1, but given my backlog of Yonah, Presler and other testing, I handed it off to Johan and he's going to hopefully have a piece ready for you after the holidays.

During one of my trips to NYC I managed to get terribly sick, which threw a wrench in my Yonah Part 2 plans. But despite pleadings from my lovely wife, I did manage to squeeze some work in during my recovery and I'm all but done with the article. I had to go back and re-run the DivX tests using the newest 6.1 build since that just came out, and most importantly, it adds multi-threading support which was broken in 6.0.3.

Surprisingly enough, the landscape has changed a bit after I updated all of the benchmarks for Yonah Part 2. There are some areas where Yonah did a lot better and there are others where its performance is a bit more complicated.

Vinney and I head down to NC for close to a month starting next week. I'll be shipping down a few testbeds so I'll have something to work on while down there, but it should be nice. We'll be leaving for CES from NC and then returning to NC before eventually making it back up here to the cold North East. But, knowing our luck, it'll probably snowing when we get down to Raleigh again :)

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now